The Last Painting of Sara de Vos Read online

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  After dinner and the auction, the guests drift back out onto the terrace. A long table has been set up with flutes of champagne, tiers of profiteroles, ramekins of crème brûlée, Belgian chocolates. As in past years, Rachel leaves the important mingling to Marty. She can never find her way into the banter of the men, or the partners’ wives, who all send their children to the same schools and colleges, so she’s content to find the outliers. The sister of the important socialite or the out-of-town cousin of some charity board member—these are the people she’s most comfortable with, the ones who don’t ask if she’d ever wanted to start a family. Marty accuses her of hiding in her own home, of having cramped, awkward conversations with total strangers. He tells her that the partners think she’s aloof instead of shy and fragile. From the corner of the terrace, from the trailing edge of a conversation about the stray mongrel the Russian scientists found on a Moscow street, Rachel can see the ornate clock on the wall of the great room and realizes the Rent-a-Beats will be here in less than half an hour. She surveys the crowd to calculate how the troupe might go over. She can’t decide if she’s trying to add levity to the evening or ambush the entire event. If she’s misread the situation then she’ll meet the bohemians in the foyer, pay them their cash fee, and send them back into the night.

  The temperature has dropped ten degrees and many of the guests have reclaimed their coats. Earlier, during cocktails, Marty built a fire in the outdoor brick fireplace, and she’d watched as Clay and the other partners took turns offering counsel, drinks in hand. At one point, Clay put on a pair of asbestos gloves and took up a cast-iron poker to rearrange the logs at the center, telling the younger men that they needed more blue flame and air at the base. Now there’s a huddle of them by the replenished fire, lawyers with cigars and loose metaphors talking philosophy, urban decay, client billing. Through the French doors, she watches the caterers ferry the dinner plates toward a clearing station they’ve set up in the back hallway, the old servants’ corridor that flanks the rear bedroom doors. Marty used to call it bedpan alley and claimed he could remember his senile Dutch grandmother—a heavy gin drinker—putting her “thunder pot” out there for the servants to fetch. But there were no servants, just an overworked housekeeper who had decommissioned the corridor years before and who didn’t find the bedpans until the smell came through the walls. There must be a dozen caterers back there by now. She has the idea that she should go and check on things, make sure there isn’t broken glass or waiters drinking from the bottle, but then she notices Marty conferring with Hester. She’d more or less given Hester the night off, after the flowers were set out, because she wasn’t getting any younger, so she wonders whether Marty pulled the poor woman from her bedroom.

  Hester walks from the terrace toward the library and then returns wheeling a metal cart, a sheet draped over the top and a tangle of extension cords trailing behind. By this time, Marty is holding Carraway in his arms and looks as if he’s about to say a few words to his guests. A few glasses of wine and he turns into his father, ready to speechify at the slightest provocation. When they go badly, these speeches are tone-deaf and sentimental. He’s gotten weepy-eyed over less than orphans before, so Rachel fears the worst as guests begin to gather around. A Bach adagio peters out from one corner of the terrace, then abruptly stops.

  Marty stares a moment at the faces in the firelight, tenses his bottom lip. “Well, I thought I would say a few words … Thank you to everyone for coming and for supporting such a good cause. As usual, we raised quite a sum tonight.”

  He pats Carraway’s hindquarters as he holds him in one crooked arm, his free hand holding a cigar.

  “As you all know, this week the first living creature was launched into space orbit on a one-way journey…”

  Rachel takes up a glass of champagne from a passing tray. She thinks, Is he really going to segue from space orbit to orphans?

  “I’m told that when the dog eats the last of her food rations in a few days, the final meal is laced with poison, or that there’s a gas for euthanasia that’s released. Apparently, this is how the Russians treat their canine space explorers…”

  A tremor works its way into his voice as he trails off. A few of the partners sip their drinks, staring into the embers of the fireplace. Rachel wonders if they’re averting their eyes in embarrassment or patriotic reflection.

  “Now, I can’t help thinking about our little beagle Carraway here and thought we could involve him in this historic moment.”

  By now, Hester has brought up a kitchen chair and Marty gently places the dog in a sitting position. He uncovers the cart to reveal his ham radio set from the library, complete with headphones and a chrome-plated microphone.

  “As it happens, Sputnik Two is giving out the same signal as the first one, so if I can find the right frequency we should be able to hear the Russkie mongrel orbiting above us. According to some of my ham radio buddies in Chicago, the signal should be within range right about now…”

  Marty looks at his watch and moves Carraway’s seat closer to the microphone. “I’m going to let Carraway listen to his competition because he could use a little wake-up call. Let’s face it—I can barely get him to walk in the park in December.”

  This gets a genteel chuckle.

  Rachel looks out across her guests. The women are smiling at Carraway as he nuzzles the metal gauze of the microphone. The men are less enthused, side-mouthing comments to each other. Marty brings the contraption to life, flipping buttons and turning a large dial in the middle. A lick of static comes in, then a stray newscast from Canada and a burst of polka, before they finally hear the signal—a bleeping, underwater tone. The pinging is almost painful to listen to, a lunar plink that contains quiet, Soviet menace.

  “Do you hear it?” Marty says. “That’s them.”

  By now the guests have edged closer and Rachel sees the men transfixed, cigars limp at their sides. For a full minute they listen to the signal. Marty plugs in the headphones and places them around Carraway’s ears, lowering the volume. The beagle flinches and barks. Marty tells his guests that the microphone is off, that he’s not licensed to let the dog make noise on his call sign, that he’d get thrown out of the ham fraternity, but pretty soon guests are encouraging Carraway to give the Russkie dog some hell. “Tell them we’re coming after them,” one of the partners calls. Marty pretends to open up the microphone and with all the commotion the dog begins barking and yapping. Finally, Marty gives Carraway a peeled shrimp from a nearby table and lets him scamper back inside and everyone claps and cheers for the little patriot. Marty makes a toast to space exploration and the rising star of America. Rachel turns and over the rim of her glass she sees the Rent-a-Beats coming onto the terrace through the French doors, Hester trailing behind them in exasperation. She imagines Hart Hanover’s confusion in the main lobby, the intercom call that Hester intercepted, and now she watches the Beats approach—America’s answer to the cosmic aspirations of the Russians. Bearded, braless, barefoot freedom. There’s six of them: three men and three women. One of the men—a Marxist poet or vegetarian philosopher—looks genuinely outraged by what he sees out on the rooftop.

  * * *

  The Beats work the edges of the crowd—conversations about art shows in abandoned electrical substations, about pancake dinners in cold-water lofts on Thompson Street. At first, they’re congenial enough and even Marty has to admit this is a clever idea. The sandaled women sip red wine and dance exotically by the fireplace. One of them teaches a partner’s wife how to do the fandango and the quartet has come back out onto the terrace to improvise. The bearded men in corduroy jackets and peacoats strike up conversations with the uptowners, taking an anthropological interest in the rituals of these obscure, affluent northerners. They flatter and defer, chuckle at a dentist’s nervous jokes. A woman wearing dragon earrings exchanges business cards with an investment banker, only her card is embossed with the word Woe on the front. For fifteen minutes, no
one can get over this deft party trick, and Marty comes up behind Rachel to tell her she’s livened things up nicely. But then Marty sees one of the men—in a red beret and army surplus jacket—holding a small group of guests hostage in his living room. From out on the terrace, he can see the man standing on an antique chair while holding up the de Groots’ fruit bowl before his vaguely terrified audience. Marty begins to move toward the house when Woe suddenly accosts him with a plate piled with shrimp. He wonders why the caterers haven’t pulled all the appetizers by now. Were these bohos going to get food poisoning out on his rooftop? “My real name’s Honey,” the woman says, “and I intend to eat my body weight in crustaceans. You must be the host. Glad to meet you, host.” She’s drunk and barefoot, wearing a flowing skirt that looks to be made from old Amish quilts. Marty offers her an anemic smile and strains to see what’s unfolding inside the apartment.

  “Why on earth is your friend standing on a chair?” Marty asks.

  “Benji? Oh, he’s high as a kite on Benzedrine. He’ll fuck that fruit bowl if you don’t watch out.”

  Marty feels himself clench as he heads toward the mayhem. The Spanish music is laced with guffaws and olés as he rushes through the glass doors and veers right.

  “Take this Bartlett pear, ladies and drones, succulent and overripe with sensuality, slumming it beside a Red Delicious … it’s waiting to be elevated to its highest calling.” The man plucks the pear from the bowl and brings it to his mouth, biting so hard that it sprays everywhere.

  “Excuse me, I think we’ve had enough,” Marty says.

  The man looks down from the chair imperiously, his beard morseled with pear flesh. Marty knows nothing about amphetamines but knows a deranged lunatic when he sees one—the man’s pupils are as big and as bright as pennies.

  “Is this the head square?” he asks his audience.

  “I think I’d better call the police,” Marty says. He can sense other guests coming in from the terrace, quietly fanning out behind him to watch.

  The man shakes his head, incredulous. “You’re paying for this, sport. You thought the sideshow would just come and sip your champagne, read some poetry about hitchhiking and sleeping in the woods, and then we’d quietly slip away. Negative assumption, amigo. Flawed logic, compadre. We are guests now in this beau monde museum and we’re off-script … your shadow side and demons have been dogging you your whole pathetic life, brother. Now they’re here. Pleased to meet you.”

  Honey stands beside Marty and says “Easy now” to the crazed man, as if to a riled horse.

  “We’ve paid for your cab fare back,” says Rachel from somewhere in the crowd. “We’ll get you all in a taxi with some leftovers from the caterer.”

  This condescension makes the man on the chair tilt and gesticulate, a street corner evangelist warming to the Apocalypse. “Oh, that kills me. We don’t want your fucking tinfoil sack lunch, Lady Macbeth. We’re not here for the food or the wine … we’re here because Amerika with a k is about to suck the phallus of Uncle Russkie and we want you to all see what a pinko commie dick looks like up close…”

  At that moment, Clay Thomas comes bustling through the crowd. Later, Marty will think that he looks no angrier than a man woken abruptly from a nap. He seems put out, but there’s nothing like violence in his manner. En route, he takes off his jacket, unclasps his cuff links, and rolls up his sleeves, like he’s about to do the dishes. But as an old Princeton welterweight, Clay is limber and martial on his feet. Marty is about to ask him whether they should call the police when he finds himself holding his boss’s dinner jacket. Without looking up at the man, Clay positions himself behind the chair and pulls the legs from the back, forcing the beatnik to lunge into a squat on the floor. He drops the fruit bowl en route, sending apples and pears under the furniture.

  “What the hell, old man!”

  Clay shoves the man once, hard, in the chest. “It’s time for you all to leave.”

  The man in the beret stands his ground for a moment, his eyes walled back, his hands limp. It seems equally possible that he’ll smash an antique vase over Clay’s head or run from the house in narcotic terror. Honey and the other Beats gather in the hallway and call to their comrade in plaintive voices.

  Rachel says, “The police are on their way.”

  He considers this, mulls it through a mental fog. Eventually he leans back on his heels and relents, following his friends down the hallway. Clay comes after them as they head into the stairwell. Marty uses the intercom to call down to Hart Hanover and tells him to make sure the intruders leave the building when they get to the main lobby. After making sure they get into the private elevator on 12, Clay appears back on the top floor to a hearty round of applause. Marty claps along, but he feels slighted and embarrassed. He just watched his sixty-year-old boss toss the Beats out like a bunch of profane teenagers causing havoc in a matinee. To make matters worse, Rachel had actually paid for this humiliation—called up and ordered it like room service.

  Clay stands beside Marty, rebuttoning his cuffs. He takes his dinner jacket back and puts it on. Clay says, “You invite the lions to a dinner party and sometimes they bite.”

  Marty knows the gracious thing to do is thank Clay for handling the situation, but he can’t. He watches the Thomases walk down the hallway. Other guests begin nodding their goodbyes and slipping out after them. Rachel is nowhere in sight and the guests are met by a chagrined Hester at the coat closet, her eyes averted. When the last of them have left, Marty stands for a moment with his back against the elevator doors. Hester says good night and he climbs the stairs before fumbling his way in the dark toward his bedroom. It’s not until he’s undressed, standing naked in the light coming from the en suite bathroom, that he thinks of this day as a cruel hoax. Rachel is turned toward the wall, feigning sleep. He’s still buzzing with embarrassment, feels it throbbing in his knuckles and teeth. He stares up at the painting, hoping to be lulled by its frozen quiet. The girl is so frail, mired between the woods and the icy river. The skaters’ faces and hands are pinked from the cold. He looks at the dog trotting on the ice, chasing after the boy, and thinks of the Russian mongrel pinwheeling through space. It’ll be many years before he discovers that the dog died shortly after leaving the atmosphere, that the high pressure and temperatures were too much for her to bear. He’ll look back on the dead space explorer and the forgery hanging in plain sight and see himself as impossibly naive. Right now, though, he notices that the picture frame is slightly askew, dipping about two inches at the right corner. He straightens it before switching off the bathroom light and climbing into bed.

  Amsterdam/Berckhey

  SPRING 1636

  In the long unraveling of her life, Sara will always come back to the leviathan. It is not the cause of Kathrijn’s death and all that follows, but it is the omen that turns their days dark. A spring Sunday, the day blue and cloudless. Word has come that a whale has beached itself in the sandy shallows at Berckhey, a fishing village near Scheveningen. Villagers have tethered it to cables and lugged it ashore where, for two days, it has lain moaning through its leathery blowhole. Buckets of seawater have been doused over the monster’s hull, to delay its passage long enough for scientists and scholars to take a proper inventory of it. To Sara’s husband, a landscape painter by training, this is a rare chance to capture a spectacle and render it with precision. The springtime markets bring a swift trade in canvases and this will surely fetch a boon price. But on the sandy track toward the coast, Sara realizes that half of Amsterdam is making a pilgrimage to see this harbinger from the deep. Barent will have plenty of competition from sketchers and painters and engravers. Sara is also a member of the Guild of St. Luke, though she often helps Barent with his landscapes, grinding pigments and building up the underlayers. Barent’s seascapes and canal scenes are popular among burgomasters and merchants; they fetch twice what she makes for a still life.

  They ride in the back of a neighbor’s wagon, a painting field kit and a w
icker basket of bread and cheese at their feet. Kathrijn is seven and dressed as if for seafaring—a cinched bonnet, sturdy boots, a compass hanging from a chain around her neck. Sara watches her daughter’s face as they follow the caravan of carts and men on horseback, out into the polder and toward the grassy dunes. When Barent told them about the talk of the leviathan in the taverns, about his desire to go paint the washed-up animal, Kathrijn’s face filled with enormous gravity. It wasn’t fear, but steely resolve. For months, she’s been plagued by nightmares and bedwetting, by terrible visions in the small hours. “I must come see that, Father,” she said earnestly. Barent tried to change the subject, commented that it was no excursion for a girl. For half an hour, it appeared this was the end of the matter. Then, over dinner, Kathrijn leaned over to Sara and whispered in her ear: “More than anything, I want to see the monster die.” Sara was slightly appalled by this grim thought leaving her daughter’s delicate mouth, but she also understood it. A monster had washed up from the deep of the North Sea to die in plain sight, tethered with ropes and cables. All the ravages of the night, the demons and specters that had kept Kathrijn awake for months, might be vanquished in a single afternoon. Sara patted her daughter’s hand and returned to her bowl of stew. She waited to talk to Barent about it at bedtime and eventually he relented.

  When they crest a hillside that overlooks the coast, Sara is certain that the whole idea is a terrible mistake. From a distance, the animal looks like a blackened, glistening pelt left to wither in the sun. It is surrounded by scores of people, all of them dwarfed by its bulk. A few men have climbed onto its enormous side with measuring rods and wooden pails. A ladder leans beside one of its twitching fins—broad as a ship’s sailcloth. As the wagon makes the final trek down to the beachhead, their neighbor, Clausz, says that when he was at sea he once saw a whale eye pickled in brandy. “Big as a man’s head, it was, and brined up in a bell jar with all the rest of the captain’s specimens from the south latitudes.” Sara sees Kathrijn’s eyes go wide and she tucks her daughter’s hair behind her ears. “Perhaps the two of us can go take a picnic while Father paints,” Sara says. Kathrijn ignores her and leans toward Clausz sitting on the box seat. “What makes them come ashore like that?” The neighbor adjusts the reins and gives it a moment’s thought. “Some say it’s a messenger from the Almighty, an oracle. Me, I’m more inclined to say the beast just lost his way. If it can happen to a ship then why not to the fish that swallowed Jonah whole?”